Intellivision Lives! (PC)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 4.0 stars Excellent
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 8.5 (4.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Andrew Park
• Reviewed on: 05/11/1999
• Updated on: 07/30/2002
• Released on: 04/30/1999
• Originally published on GameSpot: Intellivision Lives! (PC) Review

At first glance, Intellivision Lives! seems to be nothing more than an excellent collection of eminently playable classic games for the Intellivision console. However, it also serves as an interesting look back at both the history of the console and its distributor Mattel, and the highly competitive electronic gaming industry in the '80s in general, as well as a personal glimpse into the lives of the people behind Intellivision and its games.

The game's CD itself comes packed with 75 playable Intellivision games, including, with the exception of the Dungeons & Dragons games (since the rights to TSR's role-playing license has since changed hands), every title ever released for the Intellivision and some that weren't.

After installing, you navigate the CD by means of a kitschy set of menus with a decor that comes right out of Disney's infamously unpopular film TRON. Images of randomly placed single-color vector grids floating in black space, along with appropriately cheesy "space age" background music, frame scanned art from the original game boxes, manuals, and catalogs to create an atmosphere that is at once campy and reverent. Every single entry for each game comes complete with instructions and back-of-the-box company descriptions taken verbatim from the original packaging. The manuals contain "fun" and obscure facts about each game's development history.

Included on the CD is a wealth of historical information on the Intellivision: its hardware, its developers, and its corporate arm, Mattel Electronics. There's a brief but fairly comprehensive scroll-through timeline feature on the history of Mattel Electronics; specifically, its beginnings as a handheld-electronic-games manufacturer, its evolution into the distributor of Intellivision in 1980, and the eventual shutdown of the Intellivision project in 1984. Poking around the CD, one can also find the technical specs on each of the Intellivision hardware systems, hardware add-ons like the Intellivoice speech unit, and the musical Intellivision keyboard component, as well as the obligatory video clip of '80s prop comic Gallagher hollering at an Intellivision master unit before smashing it with his trademark oversized mallet. The collection also features a full index of personal profiles of various programmers and Mattel Electronics executives, which come complete with biographical information, anecdotes, photographs, and a handful of movie files. These bios fulfill the superficial task of being a showcase of the more-popular haircuts of the time but serve the deeper purpose of letting the programmers and Mattel employees of yore share their experiences.

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